Evan Semón
Audio By Carbonatix
When Westword photographer Evan Semón considered places where he could photograph e-bike owner Emily Kleinfelter for our July 5 story about Denver’s e-bike rebate program, he thought that the State Capitol would make a good backdrop.
Semón suggested the two meet at East Ninth Avenue and Sherman Street so that he could snap photos of Kleinfelter looking large with the Capitol in the background. “It kind of reminds me of that funny picture that people post when they go to the Eiffel Tower, leaning on the Eiffel Tower,” Semón says. But when Kleinfelter showed up on her newly purchased FattE-Bike, it turned out there was nothing funny about the location.
On May 14, at that exact intersection, Kleinfelter had been hit by a car while she was riding a scooter toward the inaugural Colfax Viaduct Night Market.
“I was taking a Lyft scooter over there, and I was on Sherman, taking a left onto Ninth to go down the hill, and the person driving the car was parked on the side of the road and, I thought, was going to be pulling out of their parking spot,” Kleinfelter recalls. “They ended up doing a complete U-turn out of their parking space and turned into me. I jumped off of the scooter at the last moment, but the scooter ended up underneath the car.”
Kleinfelter says that the driver kept insisting that he hadn’t seen her. And then, once he realized that she wasn’t injured, he drove away.
Semón choosing that precise location was an eerie coincidence. “I think she was definitely thinking about it. I could tell it must have been quite the experience,” Semón says.
He ended up taking a few shots of Kleinfelter from different angles. In one of them, she biked up Ninth toward the intersection with Sherman Street.
“This Suburban just blows down as we’re doing the shoot, comes screaming down Sherman,” Semón recalls, relating how Kleinfelter yelled “Slow down!” at the Suburban driver.
The May 14 crash was the fourth time that Kleinfelter has gotten nailed by a car when on a scooter or bike. The safety and regional Vision Zero planner for the Denver Regional Council of Governments, she frequently takes alternative transportation and used a City of Denver rebate to buy her new e-bike. She speaks from experience when she points to flaws in Denver’s infrastructure.
“Vulnerable roadway users – by which I mean people who are outside the protection of the metal box of an automobile – are not given the same priority for our life and our safety,” Kleinfelter says. “It’s disheartening. Honestly, with the number of miles I ride, I think that people that know me know that I say, ‘My ultimate demise will probably come at the hands of a car driver, because we are not prioritizing the lives of people outside of a metal box.'”
